The hypnotic beauty of slowness

 

One of the more valuable things that volunteers at my library do for us is empty our bins. Theoretically.

Our bins are robust, wheeled carts that automatically load and unload, and hook up to our giant automated check in machine. We have 26 of these sorting bins hooked up to the machine at all times, each one receiving a particular kind of material. For instance, one of the bins might accept all of our juvenile fiction. And when it fills up it gets pushed over to sit with other full bins. Those bins are all emptied onto shelving carts, allowing us to make use of the often in short supply empty bins once again.

 It is that part of the process I am here to talk about today.

It takes anywhere from two minutes to two hours to empty one of these bins onto a shelving cart. 

This is not a function of what is being emptied. The bins are all roughly the same effort to empty. It is a function of how they are being emptied. I would not normally imagine that emptying one of these bins could take more than ten minutes tops to empty. But alas that none of our volunteers who are capable of emptying these bins in an effective manner are at all interested in doing so. Bin emptying, for some odd reason, is our station of last resort. Only a volunteer or library helper of so little capability or ambition ends up emptying these bins and it

is

a

study

in 

slowness.

Today one of our volunteers was emptying a bin for an hour, but they hadn't quite cleared the bin yet. I was loading things onto the machine and had just completely run out of empty bins. So I dashed over and desperately emptied two of the full bins as quickly as I could. 

The volunteer was still putting the same book on the cart when I finished as they were when I started.

Surprisingly, this wasn't all that bad.

In a way I prefer it.

If I can just travel far enough beyond irritation... 

...I find myself...

fascinated.

Volunteers

 

I was coming back into the staff area after an hour at the front desk. Two super nice older lady volunteers were finishing up with emptying our usual endless lot of book bins. This is always a big help, and I was overcome with feeling for the nobility of volunteers.

"I've been here for years." I proclaimed. "But I'm just a mercenary, coming to the library for my job. You two come here and empty all these bins just to be nice. You are the real heroes around here!"

They laughed and then joked with me. "Oh, they secretly pay us a ton of money under the table." One of them said.

"Well it can't be as much as they pay me!" I exclaimed. "I don't even know what to do with it all so I just buy more and more County Commissioners."

But after we finished with the joking back and forth I suddenly was overcome with doubt. 

"Just to make sure," I said, "I wasn't being sarcastic or anything. I meant it."

One of them looked kindly at me. "We know." She said.

Volunteer appreciation plants

 

At my library we have many volunteers. And one of the things we do to thank them is that in the Spring we give out Volunteer Appreciation Plants. These are usually plastic square pots with a variety of young flower plants in them. The volunteers can plant them in their garden, or just leave them in the small pot and watch them briefly flourish and rot, which is what we do here with the unclaimed ones.

This year though we are not going to give out Volunteer Appreciation Plants. This year we are instead going to try Volunteer Appreciation Plants.

I know it sounds similar.

But we will be bringing into the library several new hires, including circulation workers, librarians, and even a new manager. These people won't actually do any library work. They'll just pretend to. What they will actually do instead is go around all day complimenting and profusely thanking the volunteers.

Low comedy

The other day I walked into the library. "Ouch!" I cried. "I should use the door."

Wait, let's start over.

The other day when I arrived at my job at the library one of my friendly co-workers, apparently just coming from a conversation that made the question relevant, asked me "Did you see that film yesterday?"

"What film yesterday?" I asked, genuinely confused.

"Sue said she thinks you saw the movie yesterday." My co-worker explained without explaining anything.

"I don't understand. I don't think I saw any movies yesterday."

"No, the movie that's called Yesterday."

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Which reminded me of how I was out at the desk a few days ago and I was talking with my co-worker partner and a young, early high school aged volunteer. I don't remember how, but "Who's on first" came up in passing. The young person got excited. Apparently he knew it really well and immediately rattled off "Who's on first, What's on second, I don't know's on third, Why is in left field..."

"Wait." I interrupted, confused "Who's on first?"

The kid looked taken aback. "Who's on first." He said like I'm not too bright.

"That's what I'm asking you." I replied. "I'm asking you who is on first?"

"Right" He said cautiously, vaguely confused and speaking slowly. "Who   is    on     first."

Then someone came to the front desk of the library. I had to help them so our party broke up.

I actually have no idea whether we were performing the routine or doing it for real.

Pain and recovery

I was in the break room kitchen at work where I go 114 times every day.  A young man who volunteers at the library once or twice a week was in there. I feel like calling him Stuart. We'll call him Stuart. He smiles, wryly, at most things I say. He has a calmness. He's a good guy.

He said "How are you doing?"

Millions of people ask "How are you doing?", but Stuart seems like he means it. So I answered with some honesty as reflected how he asked.

"I'm okay, but my back hurts."

This was a few days before I decided that pain is my friend. That's why I didn't answer "I'm okay. Pain is my friend."

To my response Stuart said something like "Bummer." with exact right amount of commiseration in it. Except it probably wasn't "Bummer" that he said because he's too young to have ever been to the 1970's.

I was in the seventies for ten years so I remember "Bummer" and "Dy-no-mite!". Oh, and the Bicentennial. And feathered hair.

But this isn't that kind of post.

Here is what I know about Stuart, most of it second hand, some by observation, a tiny bit from conversation. It might not be fully accurate:

He was driving to get a new puppy and fell asleep while driving and crashed his car. He was very close to dying. He mangled his leg and arm and possibly other things, and he suffered head injuries. This has to be at least a few years ago. He has a heavy limp and can barely use one arm and hand. He might have had to learn to talk again, but as I said, he clearly did well at learning to talk again because he has a pleasant way of speaking.

Although, come to think of it, our conversations, which have a glow, hardly have any words in them.






 

Easy recommendation

A volunteer I am very friendly with asked me for a book recommendation. We were in the back room of the library with at least a minimum amount of time to attack the problem thoroughly, so I enthusiastically committed. I would find him a book to read or give up library work forever!

I asked a few questions about his reading tastes. In addition to what I knew about him I found that he liked books he could learn from. My favorite book this year so far has been Walkable City, a fascinating tour of urban planning and design. It's about what makes cities livable and appealing, the horrible ways we've messed it up, and the clever things cities have been and are starting to do. He loved it. It sounded great!

We didn't have it.

We only have one copy, and because I've been so fanatically recommending it it's checked out!

Fine. How about that charming book about the guy who decided to try and live off of wild harvested food, It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It? Charming, funny, illuminating, and with the magical good fortune any kind of bookumentary needs: momentous, life changing events coming along as he's writing the book. They even come along because he's writing the book.

No?

No.

Okay. No problem. How about H is for Hawk. I read it early this year, beautifully written, very int... OH! He's already sold on it. He heard something about this one. He wants this H is for Hawk. It sounds great!

It is checked out with a small waiting list. 

I refuse to speak ill of the librarians, except, well, this is their fault!

No problem. My volunteering friend leaks more information. He likes Young Adult fiction. Ha. Why didn't you say so. Wee Free Men. Charming! Clever! Great-Hearted! Wise! He doesn't usually like fantasy, but this sounds appealing.

We don't have a copy at this library.

Oh, glorious teen librarian, star in our librarian firmament, oh, alas, hang your head in shame today, no Wee Free Men? Well, no problem, you can't win them all. I'm sure he's working on resolving this issue.

Anyway, onto the next one. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I don't even ask if my volunteering friend is interested now. I just look it up in the catalog to see that we have no copies checked in.

Okay.

The volunteer says "Maybe I should just go ask in the teen room. They're good with recommendations."

Even now this statement hurts me in ways it is difficult to communicate. I pretend he hasn't said anything, which he surely wouldn't have had he been thinking clearly.

As I inquire about mysteries and begin to suggest Rex Stout he says he wants a sweet book. Some difficult, mortal things have recently transpired in his life, and he needs something on the gentle side.

A gentle book of sweetness.

What's with the trickle of information? But, okay.

Sweet.

Danny Champion of the World. By Roald Dahl. Easy.
 
It's in the kids' room. The juvenile fiction and our kids' room come through! It's actually there!

Is there a mistake?

Is a chapter missing? No.

Ha!



So then, is my volunteer friend happy with my choice?


I don't know. He graciously took my book, but I might've seen him heading off for the teen desk.


I should have tried harder.

Just what is a library

Today the semi annual Friends of the Library book sale had its opening day. Many little old ladies staffed the tables outside our community room, which was now so chockablock with books of all kinds that the actual sales transactions had to take place outside the room. As the opening bell neared, eager library shoppers queued up in a line that filled our lobby and spilled thickly into the library itself. It was all a moment of chaos, holding, and eager anticipation. I innocently wandered into it in order to put out some bus schedules. Job done one of the little old ladies staffing the sale and waiting, along with everyone, greeted me, as we are old acquaintances.


I leaned towards her conspiratorially. "Don't worry." I said. "I won't let any of them know that the whole rest of this building is filled with all the same items, only those ones are all for free."

Take what you have gathered from

I don't mind bandying about with the gods and making easy use of them. But I am cautious in what I call magic, and am slow to use it, for of all things in this world magic is both the most skittish and the most friendly. 

So let's just prudently call this one an act of coincidence, even if I did find it charming.

In the morning, over a brunch of avocados and cold press, I was talking with my wife about a post I had written a day or two previously concerning new people, and about all the thousands of people I have known at the library, and about how much slower I am to now make full acquaintance with people who are around me regularly at the library. I used as an example one person that has both stood out to me as I wrote the piece (which you can surely find just a couple of days back here on the blog) and stood out as I was telling her about this. I told her about a man who we will call Steve, because that may or may not be his name, and who is somewhere within ten years of 67 years old, has been volunteering at my library for several years. For a year or two I did not exchange a word with him. Then, with a slow incremental increase we began greetings, until now we never fail to greet each other with great warmth. Our conversation remains slight, but our greetings are thorough and full of cordiality.

Two hours later my wife and I are in the area of Grand and Victoria. For those of you not from my cities this refers to the intersection of two streets, Grand, and Victoria. More? That's not enough? Okay, it's an area in the city of St. Paul with a fairly dense variety of shops and restaurants, about half chains, half originals. This is all many miles from my library, and even with the thousands of library patrons and staff I know by sight, it would be rare indeed to see any one of them in these cities of three million people, there or almost anywhere not in or quite close to the library. 

My wife and I are walking along when I hear my name called out in a kindly fashion from a car at an intersection.

It's Steve!

At least, I think that's his name. 




 

The end of reading

 



The end of reading arrived at a nondescript, large suburban library in Minnesota on the night of December 9, 2015, at 7:42 in the evening. Said library has long been one of the highest materials circulating public libraries for its size in the nation. Local library administrators had been forecasting the end of reading for fifteen years. They had planned accordingly. They looked like deranged cultists predicting the end of the world, never relenting in their mania of doom even as more and more people poured into the library to check out more and more of its never increasing collection.

But that wave broke. And what any doomsayer knows is that the predictions of doomsayers must all come true eventually. It's simply a matter of waiting.

Well here it is then, the end of reading. Run for the hills libraries. Close your doors now forever bookstores. Make up your own ideas for movies, Hollywood. Cap your pens novelists. And Amazon? You may want to consider diversifying your product line beyond books.

The poets and bloggers can keep going though. I mean, same diff.

At the large suburban library, on the night when the end of reading arrived, the million dollar check in machine sat idle for 37 straight minutes. When nothing has been checked out there is nothing to return. All the library workers were dozing in their chairs. Was the end of reading coming?

But lo. A noise!  What's that? The automated door opens! The roller and laser eyes engage. Three books are coming down the line! Hooray, three books are coming. Books to sort. Books to file. Books to push about on carts! Books to peruse. Books to fix. Books to stack. Books to display and feature and recommend. Three books!

Come librarians, come clerks and pages, come janitorial workers, and come oh you volunteer with a developmental disability. Come gather round the great check in machine who gives us work and has finally stirred from its deep slumber. Come and rejoice. Here come the books running down the line! Three books!

Hey, these aren't our books! These are low quality donations. These are unwanted books, foundling books, orphan books abandoned again at our door. Oh waily! Lo! This is all we are to receive, unwanted books all, for hard truth has broken through our gates, the end of reading has come.

Turn out the lights. Shut the doors and wrap them in chains. Burn the recommendation lists and the wooden displays to keep warm. Go home and bar your doors. The long cold has come and the Enlightenment is over. Forget the letters of the alphabet. You will need them no more. Close down your imagination. Put knick knacks on your bookshelves and keep your knowledge to yourself. There is no light left on in bookland, for the end of reading has come at last.





 

Corner

There is a longtime volunteer here at my library that I have written about before. Due to what I guess one would call developmental disabilities, her repertoire has certain limitations. Nevertheless she is very affable and I'm always happy to see her. Mostly what she says to me involves "the corner". She seems to have a wide definition of what constitutes a corner; a section of the cubicle where we process requests and answer phones, a computer over by the printer, or even occasional areas that just happen to be in the general vicinity of a wall. And what she says to me by way of introduction is something like:

"What are you doin' in the corner! You're in the corner again!" 


This is unless I am somewhere that cannot be considered by her to be a corner, in which case she says:


"You're out of the corner! Who let you out of the corner?" 


My disabilities are different than hers. And I am not keen to repeat witticisms. So one day our conversation goes like this:



Her: "What are you doin' in the corner! You're in the corner again!"
Me: "I know! I'm like a spider or something!"


And the next day it goes like this:


Her: "You're out of the corner! Who let you out of the corner?"
Me: "Thank God! I was starting to mildew!"


And the next day it goes like this:



Her: "What are you doin' in the corner! You're in the corner again!"
Me: "You think this is a corner? You should see the corner they just let me out of!"


And then the next day our conversation goes like this:


Her: "You're out of the corner! Who let you out of the corner?"
Me: "I finally found the right palms to grease."


And on and on it goes. 


Part of me worries that one day I'm going to run out of new responses, that one day she'll say something about the corner and I'll just stand there stammering. But the greater part of me understands that it doesn't so much matter what I say. I merely need to play my part.







.

Excuses

You are probably wondering why, when I was assigned to an hour long block of non-fiction shelving, I only managed to shelve one half of the top shelf of my cart.

There are good reasons.


1:00   The person replacing me at the phones was five minutes late.

1:05   One of my favorite former co-workers, who now, in retirement, subs occasionally, and who shares an interest with me in obscure, regional, and experimental candies, had brought in a candy bar called "King Bing". It had reached its optimal temperature and she was sharing it out and telling us about her trip to the largest candy store in the world in Jordan, Minnesota. King Bing was a cherry fondant surrounded by a peanut coated sort of chocolate substance. It was not particularly good due to the poor quality and artificial contents of its ingredients, but that's not really the point. The point was the small, strange adventure of eating a bite of it.

1:12   Time to sign the retirement card for co-worker that I haven't seen in a year.

1:14   While wheeling the non-fiction cart to the elevator a volunteer stopped me to inquire about my co-worker's limp. Answering him led to an account of his own knee problems, which led to a discussion of Doctors, which led to the recounting of an episode of the TV show Louie.

1:26  Failure to sufficiently push the "up" button on the elevator.

1:28  Decided it would be a good time to go to the bathroom.

1:31  Ritual gathering of clerks around the weather radar on the computer. Group musing on why it was so hazy out. No satisfactory explanation was agreed upon.

1:33  Sufficiently pushed "up" button on elevator but ran into congestion at the vestibule exit door to upstairs shelving areas.

1:35  Was asked by librarian if, as supply sergeant, I could in any way procure divider tabs. I could, but this turned out to be a far longer discussion than one would think possible.

1:40  Shelving aisle blocked up by patrons with all their pesky "browsing"!

1:43  Interesting book about unfamous baseball players from the days of yore insisted on being looked over.

1:47 - 1:56   Nine minutes of uninterrupted shelving involving large, unwieldy books with 18 digit Dewey Decimal numbers that needed to go onto horribly overcrowded shelves.

1:56  Allowance for four minutes travel time to next assignment.



When you factor in all the demands of this job, as I have above, I think you will agree with me that it's pretty amazing I got done all that I did! 

No, you need not thank me. It's all in a days work.

Everything about being back at work again

A very old volunteer here at the library, who I rather like, said, as I went walking by her this morning "Is that a smile I see on your face?"

"Don't worry." I replied. "It'll pass."

Care and feeding of volunteers

The word has come down from on high in my library system. Fortunately that is not a very long way to travel, just a very short, steep pitch. And the word is about our volunteers.

We have a lot of volunteers working at my library. Some are good, some are not, but it doesn't matter a lot either way because most of their work is in the more bulk categories. I know some of the volunteer's names well. Some volunteer's names I should know but don't and have to ask my co-workers "What's his name again?" before I slowly begin to forget it again. But there is no reason I should know all of their names.  Too many come and go in too many ways and at too many times for me to know that.

But the word is that the volunteers are precious and valuable. The word is that the volunteers often work here to be part of a community. The word is that many volunteers seek to be part of our socially maladjusted library world.

Lo, the word is, from on high, that we are to, indeed, treat the volunteers as staff.

I feel all kinds of different ways about all kinds of different volunteers, but that, treating the volunteers like staff, is more unkind than I am willing to be.

Been here awhile

There is a developmentally disabled volunteer who has been working here for at least a few years now. I've written about her before. She likes to tell stories about her family as if you are very familiar with all these people you have never heard of and will delight with her in their crazy antics. But we're not talking about one of those stories now. Indeed, our purview today is even smaller that.

I was shelving up in fiction and this volunteer came around the corner mumbling to herself, looking for something on a request list. Absorbed as she was, she was surprised to see me shelving there.

"When did you sneak in here?" She exclaimed.

"The mid nineties." I replied.

What do we make of this?

We have a lot of volunteers at my library. Some are boisterous and interactive, but a surprisingly large number of them are very quiet, diligent, persistent. With all these people, coming in for two or six or ten hours a week, an important part of the library's work gets done. There is little fanfare, little drama, and a good deal of steady work. Pretty much every day I come to work there are two or four or six of them emptying carts, putting things in order, collecting items from one of our various printed lists.

So, yesterday, we had a thank you brunch for them. It was very nice. There were attractive sandwiches and pastries- a nice spread, as my people say. The Director came in and talked to the volunteers and told them how vital and important and virtuous and wonderful they all are. I only caught a bit of the end of this soiree, but it looked like it all went very nicely.

And then today I came to work; no volunteers anywhere. I searched around. I thought maybe they'd come in later. No. I've been here now for 5 hours. I still haven't seen a one. I'd usually have seen about eight by now. Zero, nada, nothing. Certain things are starting to back up. There are absolutely no volunteers to be found.

There is a story I have told you about people who donate books to us, and it goes something like this:

The person who donates mid nineties computer programming books, or yellowed, smelly generic best sellers of the 1980's, that is, books that are mainly useless to us, asks much of us. They want their cars emptied of these books, they want their boxes and bags back, they hunger for our gracious appreciation, and they definitely, absolutely want a receipt for tax purposes ("So, shall I put down a value of, say, minus four dollars and eleven cents?"). But get people who bring in books we might use, or at least be able to sell for actual money, and it's all humble graciousness ("You sure you don't want a receipt for these beautiful first edition Dickens?" "Oh, please! It's you who give so much to me!").

This makes me think that perhaps we have crossed a line with our volunteers. Perhaps it was all too much for them. In fact, I think it was. All they ask is that we just not speak of what they give. They simply like to come empty bins for the library. Could we just leave it at that?

I guess not.

Ah well, what's done is done. Eventually, I am sure, they will recover from the burdens of our appreciation. It will fade far enough into the past, and they will return to their gracious virtue.

Out of the mouths of Library Volunteers

I like working with the Library volunteers, or, I like working around them. It's not simply the diversity of that volunteer population that I enjoy, but the way some of that diversity can lie hidden under the leveling qualities of all the mundane, but useful, volunteer tasks. I am nearly as likely to find that some regular volunteer lives in a group home and has developmental disabilities as I am to find one was a top surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. Presented with the both of them, and no prior knowledge, I may be hard pressed to say who is who. They both seem very good at putting DVDs in order. They both seem nice.

One volunteer here, who I see much less frequently these days, is very clearly developmentally disabled. I think she has Down Syndrome. She can't be much more than four feet tall. She is also very round. She charges around like a bowling ball, head down, a dynamo. I've always liked her a bit. Her communication skills are pretty limited and mainly revolve around an interest in free candy and coming up to me, putting her hands on her hips, peering up at me in dramatic mock admonishment, wagging a finger, and saying "You're trouble."

I have to admit there is a certain amount of allowance going on here from me. I am not one to normally look so warmly on teasing jokes about me unless they are truly acid free. But I do think this person is entitled to a lower, though not removed, level of responsibility. And if we can maybe come together here and agree to the many, many, glorious virtues of trouble, I am comfortable enough saying that, wow, she's really got a point there. She's got quite a point there indeed. And so there it is again. The surface tells us she is a disabled person who can barely put a sentence together, but search within that and we find a diviner of truth.

Conversation

One of our regular volunteers says to me, with amused pleasure "Roy thinks yams are yucky and said he won't eat any at Thanksgiving this year."

I don't think I have ever heard of this Roy before, have no context for his yams, and have no idea what any of this refers to. But I know this volunteer. She is fairly capable as a volunteer, consistent, reasonably dedicated. I don't know what her developmental issues are, but whatever they are they make talking with her decidedly non generic. I like her well enough. She is neither a favorite of mine nor an irritant. Judging from the rate and length of our exchanges I suppose I am neither an irritant nor a favorite to her either. I do know that talking with her works best if I apply a great deal of energy to it. I have found that conversation has a power to carry you along. It is full of rhythms and waves. You can ride it. You can rest in the other's speech. You can dance along to the call and response of it, all the sparks and light bulbs. But this, with her, is not really conversation. It's a lot more like taking turns saying things. Nevertheless it has its rhythmic, tennis like qualities to it, too, in it's own way. I mean, if you think of it as her hitting a ball to me, me hitting it back, her ignoring the return and hitting me a new ball. You see, I am nearly certain that my responses do not affect what she says next to me in any way.

I will illustrate with two examples.

Example one. I respond "Who is this Roy and what on earth does he have against yams? Can I meet him? Is he here now?"

She replies "He's so funny. Last year he wouldn't take off his shoes!"

Or, example number two. I respond "I think it would be interesting to hollow out a yam through a small access hole and cram marshmallows into the center. Then close up the yam and deep fry it in peanut oil. Wait, are we talking about yams or sweet potatoes?"

She replies "He's so funny. Last year he wouldn't take off his shoes!"

I'm okay with this. It's a dynamic that I feel underlies more library conversations than might at first be apparent. Most people are better at pretending to listen. Well, this volunteer will have none of that! And bless her for her lack of pretense. Bring me more of these crazy Roy stories. I have some stories too!